Comment by subdavis
5 days ago
What features did you want for your personal site that lead to choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a static site generator?
5 days ago
What features did you want for your personal site that lead to choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a static site generator?
SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server.
If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.
I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static sites, but when you really consider the full stack and frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd party external services they're having to depend on, they'd have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just written themselves a custom backend from the start.
I just wanted to learn how to create an enterprise grade web application. I read a book on Django last year and did a few tutorials and enjoyed it. I also deploy infra on gcp and it works well there. It cost about $60/month for baseline hosting with light traffic/storage. I will probably use it for an interface for some of my ml projects. I was also looking into dart/flutter a much steeper learning curve for me personally.
This is pretty much how I began developing websites too. Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP.
It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications.
Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.
I remember ASP (application service provider, before cloud became synonymous with hosting), you are making me nostalgic. Back then I was in sales, I was selling real time inventory control, CRM and point of sale systems distributed over Citrix Metaframe in a secure datacenter. Businesses were just starting to get broadband connections. I would have to take customers to the datacenter to motivate them to let us host their data. Eight years later, google bought the building for $1.8b and eventually bought adjacent buildings as well.
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$60/mo for a personal website is insane.
I agree. To be more clear, that $60 is an estimate for a small configuration and includes serverless infrastructure to process 500,000 requests per month, plus storage, including a 20gb sql database and 100gb of object storage to serve video and images. More ideal for an application. You run the app in a container and only get charged for the requests, the sql database is persistent, so that cost $20/month and object storage with egress is about $10/month.
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